Archive for February, 2013

Pinterest can’t challenge Facebook’s 1.06 billion users, but it seems to prove that you don’t need a lot of employees to get a lot of users.

Being a rising star in social media, Pinterest is expanding both in employees and in users. According to our numbers, Pinterest clearly beats both Facebook and Twitter when it comes to the number of users per employee, being the most efficient company in social media right now, at least in that respect.

The eventual death of the text message, or SMS has been discussed for years now. And is it any wonder, with smartphone sales booming and mobile data skyrocketing?

The demise of SMS would indeed be bad news for the phone companies since revenues for text messages were $128 billion in 2011. Instant Messages (IM), on the other hand, are free and just keep increasing in popularity.

In 2011 we concluded that the volume of SMS was still growing around the world, but the rate of increase was slowing down. Now we are back with new numbers, showing that relatively soon, WhatsApp (one of the more popular IM-services) alone could be as big as SMS.

According to comScore and Business Insider, the biggest website in the world amassed 837 million unique visitors during December 2012. That must have been Google, you might say, but you’d be wrong. In fact, Facebook took the top spot followed by Google, YouTube, Yahoo, and others.

We wanted to put those numbers in perspective and here you can see some of our take on the biggest websites in the world.

We know there are around 2.4 billion Internet users in total in the world, but did you ever wonder how many of them that are awake when you are? We did.

For example, if you live in central Europe you share time zone with millions of people in Africa. And if you live in Australia, chances are you check the morning news on your tablet at the same time as many others in Japan.

We did the same study a few years ago. Now we’re back with the latest data, more information, and we hope you will like it.

Today, in a world full of smartphones, tablets and terabyte hard drives, it’s hard to remember that not too long ago a computer was a big machine, bytes did not need any prefix, and by storage we meant cassettes or floppy discs.

By searching the archives of Bytes Magazine, we found some classic tech gear from the 70s that may have been hot back then, but that no one would buy today.

Since we launched the Pingdom Transaction Monitor, we’ve seen a great response from you, our customers. The new check type has been used in ways we wouldn’t even have imagined just a short while ago.

We have already published a detailed article covering how to use the Transaction Monitor, but we wanted to give you a few more examples. So here we present ideas of how you could use the Transaction Monitor to keep an eye on login functionality and form submissions on a website.

About the Royal Pingdom blog

This blog is the place for official news about Pingdom the company and our products and services.
You will also find tips about our services, such as our website monitoring, real user monitoring,
transaction monitoring, and more.

We also ramble and muse about technology in general, and the Internet and web technology, in particular.